Tuesday, September 27, 2016

"But we need — Lester, we need law and order. And we need law and order in the inner cities..." -- Trump

I actually would have found at least the second half of the debate entertaining, if the stakes weren't so damn high. The Daily Show's Trevor Noahsummed it up this way:

"Welcome to the real-life version of Twitter, people," Noah said. "You know that at that point, Lester Holt wasn't even moderating anymore, he was just eating popcorn with everyone else."

I admit, after watching the poorly-run Clinton campaign slide so badly since the convention, I was concerned that Donald Trump would carry his momentum into the debate. Boy, was I wrong.

An apparently sedated Hillary Clinton, halting and self-constrained, waited patiently for her moment. Then she took her best shots, in response to Trump's never ending braggadocio (his word, not mine) about his mythical business acumen, deal-making artfulness and ability to avoid paying any taxes (a charge he never denied), Hillary laid it on him.

First on his unwillingness to allow us to see his tax returns.

CLINTON: For 40 years, everyone running for president has released their tax returns. You can go and see nearly, I think, 39, 40 years of our tax returns, but everyone has done it. We know the IRS has made clear there is no prohibition on releasing it when you’re under audit.

Then on taxes. Remember Trump has been maintaining that corporations are fleeing the U.S. to evade high taxes. But Trump seems to have done pretty well here.

CLINTON: Or maybe he doesn’t want the American people, all of you watching tonight, to know that he’s paid nothing in federal taxes, because the only years that anybody’s ever seen were a couple of years when he had to turn them over to state authorities when he was trying to get a casino license, and they showed he didn’t pay any federal income tax...So if he’s paid zero, that means zero for troops, zero for vets, zero for schools or health. TRUMP: That makes me smart.

On the financial crisis, Trump played the perfect disaster capitalist. Neither of them, for reasons of their own, mentioned that the global financial collapse happened under the Republican Bush administration.

CLINTON: In fact, Donald was one of the people who rooted for the housing crisis. He said, back in 2006, “Gee, I hope it does collapse, because then I can go in and buy some and make some money.” Well, it did collapse.

TRUMP: That’s called business, by the way.

Alicia Machado

Then finally, the coup de grâce.

CLINTON: And one of the worst things he said was about a woman in a beauty contest. He loves beauty contests, supporting them and hanging around them. And he called this woman [Miss Universe contestant Alicia Machiado]“Miss Piggy.” Then he called her “Miss Housekeeping,” because she was Latina. Donald, she has a name.
TRUMP: Where did you find this? Where did you find this?
CLINTON: Her name is Alicia Machado.
TRUMP: Where did you find this?
CLINTON: And she has become a U.S. citizen, and you can bet...
TRUMP: Oh, really?

CLINTON: ... she’s going to vote this November.

It was over.

Well, not quite. Trump, fearing even further disintegration of his dwindling poll numbers among Latinos, went after Machado again this morning on FOX, claiming, she had "attitude" and calling her "the worst we ever had. The worst. The absolute worst."

"She was impossible.... She was the winner, and she gained a massive amount of weight, and it was a real problem. We had a real problem."

Clinton tiptoed cautiously around race and the latest in a string of police shootings of black men. Her best statement was:

Race remains a significant challenge in our country. Unfortunately, race still determines too much, often determines where people live, determines what kind of education in their public schools they can get, and, yes, it determines how they’re treated in the criminal justice system. We’ve just seen those two tragic examples in both Tulsa and Charlotte.

But she played it safe after that. Let's just say, the words Black Lives Matter, were never uttered.

Whereas the @realDonaldTrump let it all hang out. He started out by painting life in the black community as "living in hell" in need of "law and order" (code words for keep them in their place) and ended with his Rudy Giuliani-inspired call for more stop-and-frisk, racial profiling-- making Chicago his whipping boy.

Trump must not have known (and Hillary wouldn't say) that under the rule of Mayor Rahm Emanuel, Chicago had already become the nation's stop-and-frisk capital, well after stop-and-frisk had been ruled unconstitutional in N.Y.

In August 2013, Judge Shira Scheindlin ruled that the hundreds of thousands of Stop and Frisks performed annually by the NYPD amounted to racial profiling and violated the 4th Amendment's protections from unreasonable search and seizure because they were based on generalized suspicion.

By the summer of 2014, Chicago cops performed a quarter million stop-and-frisks in just 90 days, without making any arrests. Shootings in the city (including those by police) continued to rise at a record pace before the policy was changed. Stop-and-frisk was proven to be a failed, racist policy.

Trump continued to insist that "stop and frisk" wasn't racial profiling. It was stopping "bad people." It amounted to his only plan for resource-starved black and Latino communities.

It was a desperately-needed win for Clinton. A big defeat for Trump who limped away, crying he had a "defective mic" and that Republican moderator Lester Holt was an agent of the "left-wing" media. His mentor, Giuliani even advised him to skip the remaining debates. Good advice.

DON'T ASK. DON'T TELL...As expected, public education never came up in the debate and the word education was only mentioned in passing three times -- all by Clinton. There was never even a mention of Trump University, school closings, common core, testing, unions, or charter schools.

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